The Trusted Executive

Build a positive relationship with your workforce by developing trustworthiness as a leader with this innovative and practical coaching model.

Key features at a glance

Presents a model of three pillars and nine leadership habits that inspire trust, built on rigorous research and 10 years' experience coaching CEOs and their teams

Offers interviews with board-level executives from international organizations, including JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle), Telenor, The Market Research Society, Unilever, John Lewis Partnership and Jupiter Life Insurance

About the book

SHORTLISTED: CMI Management Book of the Year 2017 - Commuter's Read Category

The Trusted Executive helps leaders create a strategy for building trust in a globalized, technology-enabled, diverse and increasingly sceptical world.

Through innovative coaching exercises, self-assessment exercises, inspirational interviews with international CEOs and underpinned by rigorous academic research, The Trusted Executivegives leaders the tools to build trust through three key pillars: ability, integrity and benevolence. Underpinning these pillars lie nine habits of trustworthiness; habits that will enable executives to deliver outstanding results, inspiring relationships and a positive contribution to society. With tools for measuring and developing leadership trust and focused strategies for handling trust violations, The Trusted Executive takes account of the ever-changing, increasingly diverse and multi-generational work environment. An essential tool for leaders who want to create a positive long-term legacy.

About the authors

John Blakey

John Blakey is a leading executive coach and board adviser working with CEOs and elite sport coaches around the globe. His business experience includes time as a Fast Track 100 entrepreneur, FTSE100 International Managing Director and Chair/Director of a number of voluntary organisations. He is a regular speaker at international business conferences and is an advisory board Chair for Vistage, the world's largest CEO membership organisation. John Blakey's previous book Challenging Coaching is a standard coaching text. He has an MBA from Aston Business School and is currently researching a PhD on the role of CEO leadership in building organizational trust. John was also named as one of the top thought leaders on organisational trust at the Trust Across America awards in 2016. This accolade reflects his prize-winning doctoral research on trust at Aston Business School, as well as his practical experience as a highly successful business leader.

Reviews

Martyn Proctor, Executive Director, Ernst & Young

John hits the mark with this book: the world is intuitively reaching out for leadership that behaves with integrity and appropriate humility, whilst exhibiting the necessary foresight and confidence to help their organisations and communities be successful with a wider responsible vision. John's practical and inspired approach offers a structured framework to help anyone succeed in this way - backed up by enough studies and evidence to show this approach is real. I can see this will reflect the defining behavioural style for leadership very quickly.

Heath Monk, CEO, Future Leaders Trust

This is a well-researched and thought-provoking book on the concept of trustworthiness and its importance to modern organisations in a world of ever-increasing transparency. Most importantly, it asks searching questions of leaders and sets out a challenging, yet practical series of actions that can, if done together and with consistency, build genuine trust across and beyond an organisation. I would thoroughly recommend to leaders in all sectors - it's time to take the red pill.

Jane Frost CBE, CEO, Market Research Society

This inspiring book sets out a leader's individual responsibility for driving the actions that create organisational trust. It is highly readable and addresses both the theory and the practice of the trust-building challenge. The measures John recommends are highly practical and well within the capability of all business leaders who are determined to leave a positive legacy.

Gina Lodge, CEO, The Academy of Executive Coaching

The Trusted Executive is an invaluable forward thinking handbook for every existing or aspiring leader. John clearly defines and develops key attributes for leaders the world deserves. The reader is coached through theoretical and practical exercises and examples which demonstrate both significant personal experience and considerable depth of research.

Paul Kehoe, CEO, Birmingham Airport

What this bold and thought-provoking book shows is that there is an urgent need to re-build trust through developing leaders that don't just 'talk the talk', but who also 'walk the talk

John hits the mark with this book: the world is intuitively reaching out for leadership that behaves with integrity and appropriate humility, whilst exhibiting the necessary foresight and confidence to help their organisations and communities be successful with a wider responsible vision. John's practical and inspired approach offers a structured framework to help anyone succeed in this way - backed up by enough studies and evidence to show this approach is real. I can see this will reflect the defining behavioural style for leadership very quickly.